Time Machine Failure
Published 10 months ago in macintoshI got an interesting error message today after trying to use Time Machine for the first time:

click for full size image
“Unable to complete backup. An error occurred while copying files to the backup volume.”
Thanks Apple. That fucking useful…
Why didn’t the error message just say:
“Sorry, something went wrong.”
How about telling what went wrong and how I can fix it?
The help documents for Time Machine are pretty worthless too. ugh… trying again, I guess.
update: looks like searching ‘/var/log/system.log’ for “backupd” with Console.app will get you the error messages that are causing Time Machine to fail. I just found this string “Nov 11 18:35:25 Macintosh-4 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[3488]: MDBackupIndexFile returned -1134 for: /Applications/Address Book Exporter.app/Contents/Info.plist, /Volumes/Terra/Backups.backupdb/John Engler’s Computer/2007-11-11-092541.inProgress/3B403D2E-A7F8-40F2-8552-C8FC6E608AF7/Intelligence/Applications/Address Book Exporter.app/Contents/Info.plist” in my log file. So, I’m deleting Address Book Exporter from the Applications folder now. Will try again… thanks to this post in Apple’s Discussion forums for the pointers.
One Response to “Time Machine Failure”
Leave a Reply
Search
Subscribe
Archives
- September 2008
- August 2008
- July 2008
- June 2008
- May 2008
- April 2008
- March 2008
- February 2008
- January 2008
- December 2007
- November 2007
- October 2007
- September 2007
- August 2007
- July 2007
- June 2007
- May 2007
- April 2007
- March 2007
- February 2007
- January 2007
- December 2006
- November 2006
- October 2006
- September 2006
- August 2006
- July 2006
- June 2006
- May 2006
- April 2006
- March 2006
- February 2006
- January 2006
- December 2005
- November 2005
- October 2005
- September 2005
- August 2005
- July 2005
- June 2005
- May 2005
- April 2005
- March 2005
- February 2005
- January 2005
- December 2004
- November 2004
- October 2004
- September 2004
- August 2004
- July 2004
- June 2004
- May 2004
- April 2004
- March 2004
- February 2004
- January 2004
- December 2003
- November 2003
- October 2003
- September 2003
- August 2003
- July 2003
- June 2003
- May 2003
- April 2003
- March 2003
- February 2003
- January 2003
- December 2002
- November 2002
- October 2002
- September 2002
- August 2002
- May 2002
Categories
- asides (445)
- baby (6)
- design + dev (142)
- for sale (7)
- get a job (11)
- investing (6)
- leadership + management (145)
- life stories (251)
- macintosh (320)
- marketing + advertising (223)
- Moveable Type (52)
- organization (6)
- photography + video (68)
- publishing + content (136)
- random (239)
- Saab (1)
- sales and selling (93)
- small business (147)
- stuff (67)
- sysadmin (40)
- travel (42)
- Video (2)
- windows (69)
- WordPress (13)

I saw this error every few hours while my first Time Machine backup was underway. Eventually it finished backing up all 0.5T of my data for the first time. The error has not reoccurred since.